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Genes, Memes, Language, and Nanomachines: a Nanoscale Approach to Refugee and Immigration Law TWIBELL EDIT VERSION 4/10/20 12:44 PM GENES, MEMES, LANGUAGE, AND NANOMACHINES: A NANOSCALE APPROACH TO REFUGEE AND IMMIGRATION LAW ANDREI TWIBELL*†‡ [W]et nanotechnology is incredibly powerful . think of how beautiful your daughter is. ~ Dr. Richard Smalley, 1996 Nobel Prize Laureate in Nanotechnology1 We have been living in the Age of Nanotechnology for hundreds of years . what has distinguished past efforts from current achievements is understanding and control. ~ Dr. Douglas Natelson, Professor, Rice University, 20152 * Attorney, Alexandria, Virginia. Admitted in Missouri and Kansas. Supervisory Immigration Services Officer, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (“USCIS”), Washington, D.C. Field Office, Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”). J.D., University of Missouri-Kansas City and B.S. Public Administration and Public Law, Missouri State University, Springfield, Missouri. Lead Literary Editor, UMKC Law Review Managing Board 1997-98 and William C. Vis International Arbitration Moot 1998, Vienna, Austria. † The author worked for USCIS at the U.S. Embassy in Athens, Greece for five years as an Overseas Adjudications Officer and Acting Field Office Director in Athens and Nairobi, Kenya. During that time, he worked in eighteen countries including work details to Africa, the Middle East, and Europe inter alia processing refugees and conducting naturalization. He was also the Training Officer and Supervisor for USCIS in Boston. Prior to public service, he practiced immigration law at The McCrummen Immigration Law Group in Kansas City, Missouri and at WilmerHale in Boston. The views expressed are the author’s personal views and are not sponsored, endorsed in any way, nor necessarily shared by USCIS, the DHS, or the United States Government. ‡ Special thanks to Robert A. Freitas, Jr., Senior Research Fellow of the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, whose conversations and ideas on nanotechnology and law contributed to this article’s original concepts. Special thanks also to Noam Chomsky, Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his comments and references to physicality of thought. Special thanks to Dr. Douglas Natelson of Rice University for his comments on the application of refugee and immigration law to nanotechnology, and also to Mr. Gregg Beyer of USCIS and UNHCR (ret.), for direction to his research on the Lautenberg program. Special thanks to the Library of Congress and its Law Library staff particularly on legislative history, and most of all, thanks to the Editor-in-Chief Claudia Fendian and the Editors of the Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal for their editing and comments. 1 Richard E. Smalley, Nobel Prize Laureate, Nanotechnology and the Next 50 Years, University of Kansas City School of Education (Mar. 20, 1997). But see, e.g., R.E. Smalley, Nanotechnology and the Next 50 Years, University of Dallas Board of Councilors (Dec. 7, 1995) (transcript available at http://www.oocities.org/area51/shadowlands/6583/project075.html) [hereinafter Smalley, University of Dallas]. 2 DOUGLAS NATELSON, NANOSTRUCTURES AND NANOTECHNOLOGY 4 (2015). Twibell Book Proof (Do Not Delete) 4/10/20 12:44 PM 66 Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Journal [Vol. 29:65 There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. ~ Walter Benjamin, 19403 I. INTRODUCTION This article centers on “nanotechnology.” However, at the outset, it important to put aside its technical definition and not to think about what it means. It is a new revolutionary technology in some important respects, but it must be thought about in a new way. The term relates to that which is universally familiar to all. One sees it every morning when they look in the mirror to wash their face or brush their hair.4 They see it when they look at the color of someone’s eyes or skin, the green of a tree and its structure contrasted with other trees and foliage in a forest. Ones tastes it eating food. They experience it when their relative is being treated for cancer5 or see a nuclear bomb test on television. They note it growing up acquiring their own ethnicity or observing someone else’s different ethnicity. It is the basis of human language. It can spread when humming a tune.6 One even experiences it when they think a thought. What is new about this term is only increased understanding and ability.7 Once this is understood, new analysis follows about the law and its ability to regulate some newer aspects of this old technology. This article explores these issues in depth. They are among the most important issues today and few are less critical nor as fast evolving. The first step in this process will be to look into the mirror of the past. It is a story about a man named Walter Benjamin. It is about his ethnicity, language, and his infamous observation about civilization,8 or better, human nature.9 All of which, are regulated by law. A. THE EXAMPLE OF WALTER BENJAMIN Walter Bendix Schoenflies Benjamin 10 was a German ethnic Jew born in 1892 to a wealthy Berlin family.11 Benjamin became a very influential 3 A.J. Goldman, Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin Don’t Talk. They Sing, N.Y. TIMES, June 24, 2018, at C5. 4 See Smalley, University of Dallas, supra note 1. 5 See, e.g., Fangfang Cao et al., Ultrasmall Nanozymes Isolated Within Porous Carbonaceous Frameworks for Synergistic Cancer Therapy: Enhanced Oxidative Damage and Reduced Energy Supply, 30 CHEMISTRY MATERIALS 7831, 7831 (2018). 6 See RICHARD DAWKINS, THE SELFISH GENE 245–60 (1976) (discussing memes as new replicators in Chapter 11). 7 See NATELSON, supra note 2, at 4. 8 See Goldman, supra note 3, at C5. 9 Human nature may reveal violent tendencies. STEPHEN PINKER, THE BLANK SLATE: THE MODERN DENIAL OF HUMAN NATURE 6 (Penguin Books 2002). 10 “The German Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is now widely considered to be one of the most important witnesses to European modernity.” HOWARD EILAND & MICHAEL W. JENNINGS, WALTER BENJAMIN A CRITICAL LIFE 1 (2014). 11 Peter Osborne & Matthew Charles, Walter Benjamin, STAN. ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHIL. (July 22, 2015), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2015/entries/benjamin/. At the height of Benjamin’s career Twibell Book Proof (Do Not Delete) 4/10/20 12:44 PM 2019] Genes, Memes, Language, and Nanomachines 67 critical theorist and philosopher and remains one today.12 In 1933, Benjamin left Germany for the last time with other Jewish contemporaries.13 He continued his work abroad living in Denmark and France.14 Benjamin was initially placed into a concentration camp for German citizens in France.15 After the German invasion, he lived in fear in Vichy, France. He attempted to flee to Spain with friends16 because he lacked the necessary exit visa.17 During this time—a period known as the “reign of terror”—he told a friend that people “were being dragged out of their beds in the middle of the night, tortured and then murdered.”18 Benjamin then hiked through the Pyrenees mountains, attempting to enter Spain as an illegal refugee,19 but was turned away at a small border town for not having the necessary exit visa.20 That evening on September 27, 1940, Benjamin took his own life21 in Portbou because “soon after his arrival in Spain he was betrayed by the hotel owner.”22 He feared “the Spanish would turn him over to the French border police, who would hand him to the Nazis . .”23 At the in the 1920s and 1930s, his “politically oriented, materialist aesthetic theory proved an important stimulus for both the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory and the Marxist poet and dramatist Bertolt Brecht.” Id. His work continues to spur literature productivity to this day in large volume. Id. His colleagues today claim that he significantly contributed to the “revival of Early German Romanticism.” Id. Benjamin graduated summa cum laude from the University of Bern in Switzerland in 1919 and his doctoral dissertation, The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism, helped spur his novella on Goethe that put into play his described art criticism. Id. Benjamin moved from writing for “Der Anfang (‘The Beginning’), a journal dedicated to Wyneken's principles on the spiritual purity of youth” to turning to the left and visiting Moscow. Id. See WALTER BENJAMIN, MOSCOW DIARY (Gary Smith, ed. & Richard Sieburth, trans., 1986). He “was closely involved in the plans for a left-wing periodical to be entitled “Crisis and Critique,” in collaboration with Ernst Bloch; Sigfried Kracauer; and, among others, the Marxist poet, playwright, and theatre director Bertolt Brecht.” Osborne & Charles, supra note 11. “Bertolt Brecht was one of the most influential playwrights of the 20th century.” Bertolt Brecht, POETRY FOUNDATION, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/bertolt-brecht. (last visited Aug. 26, 2019). 12 See generally Osborne & Charles, supra note 11. 13 “And then in 1933, the year in which the Nazis came to power and Benjamin fled Germany for the last time . .” Stuart Jeffries, The Storm Blowing from Paradise: Walter Benjamin and Klee’s Angelus Novus, VERSO BOOKS (Aug. 2, 2016), https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2791-the-storm-blowing- from-paradise-walter-benjamin-and-klee-s-angelus-novus. 14 See, e.g., JAY PARINI, BENJAMIN’S CROSSING: A NOVEL (1996) (a fictionalized autobiography of Benjamin’s flight abroad in France and Spain). 15 “With the outbreak of war in 1939, Benjamin was temporarily interned in the French “concentration camps” established for German citizens.” Osborne & Charles, supra note 11. 16 See, e.g., Douglas Martin, Lisa Fittko, Who Helped Rescue Many Who Fled the Nazis, Dies at 95, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 21, 2005, at B7. [Lisa] Fittko emerged from a leftist, artistic family to become active in the resistance to Hitler in the early months of his rule, then fled to continue the fight in other European countries for seven years.
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